If you read any of the extensive coverage of the Tea Party Convention going on this weekend in Nashville, TN, be prepared for dramatic stories of rampant grassroots infighting. The real story is much different.

We are not weighing in on the climate debate. We are not opining on whether the world’s climate is changing, at what pace or due to what causes, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Shapiro insisted on announcing the SEC’s new “interpretive guidance” on climate change.

Fri, Feb 05, 2010

Obama was so ecumenical that he never once mentioned “Jesus” or “Christ” or called himself a follower of Jesus Christ or a Christian. It wasn’t as if the president was pinched for text; this was a 2,000-word oration, with numerous figures mentioned.

Stung by his defeat in Massachusetts after a personal appearance on behalf of Martha Coakley and a long speech telling Massachusetts voters why they had to send her to Washington, President Obama seems intent on punishing the entire nation with speech after speech after speech.

Two years ago, Time critic Richard Corliss wrote an article that clearly must have resonated at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Oscar telecast was sinking in the ratings, he wrote, because the nominees were largely unwatched by the masses.

Barack Obama assumed the presidency determined not just to promote certain policies but to tidy up our minds as well. Some things we'd been saving, like conservative ideas on national defense and such, would have to go.

No nation ever has had a better military than today's all-volunteer U.S. armed forces. Though I wouldn't trade anything for the young Americans I served with in Vietnam -- or afterward -- those presently wearing America's uniforms are the brightest, best-educated, best-trained and most combat-experienced military the world ever has seen.

The President went to the House Republicans’ conference and proclaimed: “I am not an ideologue.” Just like Richard Nixon: “I am not a crook.” Or Bill Clinton: “I did not have sex with that woman.” Or any number of other politicians’ emphatic pronouncements of what they were not when in fact they were, or were not doing when, of course, they were doing.

Little boys love to play with trains. It doesn’t stop, even when they grow up and move to Washington. Now the Democrats and Barack Obama are playing with trains and $8 billion of our money to build themselves a nationwide train set just like the Europeans.

The Obama Administration and both houses of the U.S. Congress are fast-tracking a number of programs designed to increase the size of what's commonly known as the “welfare state.” These programs are having a devastating impact on American charitable giving.

This week the watchdog of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Neil Barofsky, submitted his quarterly review and testified before Congress. In England, former Prime Minister Tony Blair also testified -- for six hours under cross-examination -- at a widely anticipated inquiry into the Iraq War.

In the midst of the usual glut of Super Bowl commercials with messages about beer, cars and women with impossible bosoms, on Sunday there will be one 30-second message that has some people upset, even angry.

On Monday, the Obama administration released it 2011 budget with an estimated $1.3 trillion deficit. Taxes equal 15 percent of the gross domestic product in 2011, and rise by a third to 20 percent of GDP in 2020.

At first, it seemed like a bonehead move. On Monday morning, the campaign for Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner's bid for the governor's office sent out an e-mail announcing that the candidate would hold a news conference at its headquarters.

Irving Kristol, the recently deceased godfather of neoconservatism, once said to me, "Fairness is not a liberal value." I thought about his asseveration while observing the liberals' colossal indignation over conservative activist James O'Keefe's entry under false pretenses into the district offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.

This week, President Obama had the dubious pleasure of offering a budget with a deficit of more than a trillion dollars. He could have done something more politically attractive: unveil a plan to curb the runaway spending of the Bush years.

Bold journalist Brit Hume took a lot of heat last month for saying, while commenting on the fall of Tiger Woods, that Buddhism does not "offer the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith."

Just days before Congressman Jim Clyburn had the “audacity” to admit what D.C. politicians were actually doing with our tax dollars, U.S. President Barack Obama had the cowardice to continue concealing government’s unprecedented generational larceny.

On Day One of his vow to take "meaningful steps to rein in our debt," Barack Obama asked Congress to freeze portions of discretionary domestic spending. This would follow an astonishing permanent expansion: Republicans on the House Budget Committee say appropriations bills Obama has signed, along with his stimulus spending, have increased discretionary domestic spending 84 percent.

Wed, Feb 03, 2010

What about that new abstinence study? Well, it's just the gold standard for intervention research, a bright and shining pinnacle of research design that social science seldom ever reaches: random assignment.

In a "Special Report" on the president's question-and-answer session with Republicans last Friday, MSNBC's jock-sniffers Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow produced a museum-quality show.

This week, the State of Illinois concluded its primaries for its soon-to-be-open United States Senate Seat. This seat, President Obama's until he won the presidency, has gained infamy with former Illinois Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich's efforts to "sell" the seat to the highest bidder.

Every president is subject to forces beyond his control. If unemployment were at 5 percent, President Obama would be doing fine. If the Christmas bomber's pants had exploded successfully, Obama would be in far worse shape.

Behind every seemingly good deed in the Obama White House, there's a deep-pocketed, left-wing special interest. Take first lady Michelle Obama's crusade against childhood obesity. Who really benefits from the ostensible push for improved nutrition in the schools?

Many window-making companies struggle because of the recession's effect on home building. But one little window company, Serious Materials, is "booming," says Fortune. "On a roll," according to Inc. magazine, which put Serious' CEO on its cover, with a story titled: "How to Build a Great Company."

John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, in an hour-long television documentary titled "Global Warming: The Other Side," presents evidence that our National Climatic Data Center has been manipulating weather data just as the now disgraced and under investigation British University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit.

In his book "The Courage to Be Catholic," author George Weigel surprised readers by insisting that the very secular and liberal Boston Globe and The New York Times had done the Lord's work in rooting out the story of child sexual abuse by priests in the Catholic Church.

A president knows he is going through a hard patch when even his strongest supporters write, "Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won't be able to close it."

President Obama was disingenuous when he said that the budget deficit he faced "when I walked in the door" of the White House was $1.3 trillion. He went on to say that he only increased it to $1.4 trillion in 2009 and was raising it to $1.6 trillion in 2010.

There sure is something different about President Obama. Usually, the State of the Union address is a laundry list of proposals spiced with sycophantic applause and dipped in an admixture of boredom and bravado. It is rarely a statement of basic philosophy. Not for President Obama.

While serving on the House Appropriations Committee, Nancy Pelosi used the mantra that, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.” She was being honest, particularly in regard to what she “needed” from the United States taxpayer.

Tue, Feb 02, 2010

This is the year of the angry voter, and one of the things they're angriest about is that the government's spending our money faster than we can make it, piling up mountains of debt that threaten to drive the U.S. economy into another financial crisis.

Do the citizens of the states have a constitutional right to recall their Members of Congress before the end of their set terms, if they become satisfied that their Members are seriously harming the interests of the people who elected them?

Just when you thought environmental extremists couldn’t go any further, they surprise you with yet another ploy in their never-ending quest to turn back modernity. With the public push-back on the cap-and-trade scheme and creating man-made droughts to save a 2-inch fish, environmentalists have become craftier in their efforts.

While al Qaeda strives to increase its ability to attack the United States, the Obama administration is voluntarily relinquishing the tools Congress provided to fight terrorists. After September 11th, Congress granted the president special national security powers, including the right to detain and interrogate terrorists and to try them in military commissions. This marked a major policy change, with a switch in focus from punishing terrorist attacks to preventing them.

The Obama administration and Democratic Congress “rejected funding for school vouchers for poor children in Washington, DC, but supported funding for abortions for the mothers of those children.” The contrast is breathtaking, but true.

This past weekend, after President Obama addressed the annual retreat of Republican Members of the House, I, along with my Salem Radio colleague Hugh Hewitt, and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, were also invited to address them.

There was a recent flap because three different members of the Obama administration, on three different Sunday television talk shows, gave three widely differing estimates of how many jobs the president has created.

While the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts are preparing to go head-to-head in Super Bowl XLIV at Sun Life Stadium in Miami, U.S. justices and even our president are squaring off in arenas of jurisprudence from sea to shining sea.

The perennially optimistic strained to find evidence of a new centrism in President Obama's State of the Union address. Well, the Hyde Park liberal embraced nuclear power, they say. And he did seem to.

Last week, an insurance industry report found that bans on using hand-held cell-phones while driving in California, New York, Washington, D.C. and Connecticut did not reduce the number of car crashes. To the contrary, crashes went up in Connecticut and New York, and slightly in California, after the bans took effect.

Hugo Chavez’ inspirational debt to Ernesto “Che” Guevara is such that he titled his regime's socio-economic model, "Mision Che Guevara." Don't look for much of this in the MSM--but as I write Venezuela's youth are hitting the streets in the tens of thousands and with raised fists--AGAINST Castro/Che brand- socialism (having gotten a taste.)

Whether or not the groundhog sees his shadow on Feb. 2, there's no denying that January put into a deep freeze the claims of crisis by global warming alarmists. Frigid temperatures destroyed fruit and coral in Florida, and snow fell on Al Gore's palatial home in normally warmer Tennessee.

Well, a good chunk of our tax money finances a steadily-growing government workforce. State and local governments spent $1.1 trillion on employee wages and benefits in 2008. That’s half of what those governments spent overall.

The mass media is a-buzz over the Alan Guttmacher Institute's “news” on teen pregnancy. Guttmacher and those who advocate free sex for teenagers seem almost gleeful as they misuse the statistics in an effort to destroy abstinence education programs and promote their condom cure-all mantra.

A battle of enormous portent is about to begin on Capitol Hill. When the fight to fulfill President Obama's oft-repeated commitment to repeal what he misleadingly persists in calling "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) is over, one thing is certain.

Just whom are we trying to impress? That's a question that occurred to me when, on his second full day in the presidency, Barack Obama announced we would close the Guantanamo detainee facility within one year.

I’m glad I don’t teach at Temple University in Philadelphia, where students now have to pay an unconstitutional after-the-fact security fee levied by the university. This fee was for hosting none other than 'controversial' politician Geert Wilders.

Speeches don’t cut spending. Growing government spending and entitlement handouts will never create a vibrant economy. Get ready for a long road to economic recovery. Thankfully, America was built on individual responsibility.

At the very end of his State of the Union address, President Obama said, “we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system -– to secure our borders and enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation.”

Because Hannah Giles (the femme fatale of the ACORN sting) is my daughter, as soon as the news of her ACORN companion James O’Keefe’s arrest in the Big Easy hit the fan, our phone lines lit up like a Christmas Tree with inquiries from friends and family, talk show hosts, bloggers and the Associated Press wanting to know what the heck was going on.

Nearly 65 years after his famous grandfather was first asked to run as a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representative from that state’s 12th district, 30-year old Christopher Cox has put his hat in the ring for the seat in New York’s first district on Long Island.

I suspect that there are also many Americans who have had private, personal experiences with the many new ways that our government has intervened into the private economy, and what was purported to be an offer of “help” turned out to be a “cure” that was more painful than the ailment.

When CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson dug into the latest House expenses filing for the climate confab, she found that the cost for a hotel room for the congressional delegation of 15 Democratic and six Republican members of Congress and 38 staffers was $2,200 per person per day -- more than most Americans spend on their monthly mortgages.

For the past year, Republicans have been criticizing Barack Obama for out of control spending. So they must be pleased that they have forced him, in his State of the Union address, to concede the point by proposing a freeze on outlays of the kind Republicans generally don’t like.

If someone asks me to briefly describe the philosophical difference between the liberal-left Democrats and the conservative Republicans, I simply point out that the Dems believe in the politics of envy while the GOP believes in the politics of true hope.